Christian Eriksen gives us faith that miracles really do happen

TIGER WOODS is surely the all-time king of comebacks.

Incredibly, after nearly losing a leg in a car accident barely a year ago, there’s a good chance he’ll be competing in The Masters at Augusta this week.

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It wouldn’t be the first time he’s come back from the brink. Twelve years ago, after some well-publicised, erm, turbulence in his private life, he took a break from golf and slipped to 58 in the world rankings. When he returned, he got himself up to No1 again.

Then his back gave way, eventually needing four major surgeries to fix it. This saw him drop out of the top 1,000 golfers list altogether.

Some of us thought Tiger was finished but he had other ideas. In 2019 he only went and won The Masters yet again, his first Major win in 11 years.

But even his achievements might now have been eclipsed by Christian Eriksen, who scored in Brentford’s astounding 4-1 win at Chelsea on Saturday.

To come back from serious injury is one thing, to come back from the dead is quite another.

Eriksen, you’ll remember, suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch during Denmark’s first match in last summer’s delayed Euros.

Afterwards, thanking football fans for their support, Eriksen said he “died for five minutes” on the pitch. And now here he is, again gracing our Premier League.

Fact can be stranger than fiction, not least in football. In the autumn of 2014 Alan Pardew, under grave pressure at Newcastle, finally put together a winning run. The next match, at home to Liverpool, fell on Halloween weekend.

One of the Toon Army made a banner which read: “PARDEW – BACK FROM THE DEAD.”

How we laughed. Now Christian Eriksen is doing it for real. As a Spurs fan called Billie pointed out on Twitter, the last time his team won at Stamford Bridge, Eriksen scored for Tottenham.

“Not saying that was a long time ago,” he tweeted, but since that happened, “he’s gone to Inter (Milan), won the league, died, come back to life, joined Brentford and scored there again.” Nicely put.

Last rites to world champ

Heroes in action films get to a point when it looks as though they’re doomed. Every fight sequence features a moment when it looks as if our hero is beaten — but they always come out on top.

In films, I find this a bit boring. It’s always the same. In sport it’s different because there is no such certainty. Far from it. When you’re finished, you are normally finished, which is why we love it so much when someone beats the odds.

And those odds are long. There are really very few examples in sporting history of sportsmen and women making it back and getting to the very top.

Lance Armstrong did it, of course, winning the Tour de France after recovering from testicular cancer. But I think we can discount that one given he cheated to do so.

Further back, in motor racing, Niki Lauda came to grief in the 1976 German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring. His Ferrari left the track, hit an embankment and burst into flames.

By the time he was pulled from the car he’d suffered severe burns to his head and inhaled hot toxic gases, damaging his lungs and Lord knows what else. Later he fell into a coma and was given the last rites.

I remember watching that accident as a kid, horrified. Delighted as I was that the great man survived and, miraculously, was racing again just six weeks late, I was just as delighted when our own James Hunt pipped the great Lauda to the title that season, by just one point.

But I’ll give you one guess which driver took the title the following year: Lauda, of course. From the last rites to world champion in barely a year.

Every successful athlete is a miracle in my book . . . but some are more miraculous than others.

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I’ll follow File’s Lucy anywhere

THE Ipcress File on ITV has been brilliant.

Admittedly, my grasp of the plot is decidedly sketchy.

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But I’m engrossed in it anyway. I love the look of it.

I often wonder if I’d be brave enough to be of any use as a spy. The answer is no.

Although if Lucy Boynton’s Jean Courtney asked me to go anywhere with her, at any risk to myself, the answer would be yes.

Pampered pooches

A LEAGUE table of which dog breeds have the most money spent on them suggests dachshunds, or sausage dogs, are the most pampered.

An average of nearly £2,000 a year is spent on these low-bellied cuties. How I snorted with mocking laughter, until I remembered the expensive rubbish I bought upon acquiring a first dog during lockdown.

The astroturfed, free-draining toilet area (with integral sprinkler system, if you don’t mind) attracted about one per cent of the wee that ended up puddling the kitchen floor.

And as for the doggie rucksack, designed to haul your hound around before their injections, on it’s one and only outing my dog took exception to the arran-gement and bit half my ear off.

If you’d like either of these two items — the dog bog or rucksack, not the dog — do let me know.

June a true great

JUNE BROWN was a proper star in that it didn’t matter whether you were familiar with her work or not, you still knew who exactly who she was and what she did.

When I was at college in London way back in the last century, a mate of mine from school hitchhiked up from Brighton where he was studying. He got to mine in a state of some excitement.

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“You’ll never guess who picked me up!” he blurted out. “Dot Cotton!”

I couldn’t have been more impressed.  June was at the peak of her fame. And she was delightful with it, he said.

I met her only once, a good 30 years later, when we were both panellists on Would I Lie To You?.

When I was introduced to her, I don’t mind telling you, my legs went all wibbly-wobbly in admiration. I told her she’d once given a mate of mine a lift. I was a mite concerned she might say, “Nah, not me, darling,” and the story would be ruined for ever.

But I needn’t have worried. “Oh yes,” she said with a delighted smile. “I often used to do that, just to help young people out, you know.”

Bless her.

Awful ‘norm’

IT bothers me terribly that word of atrocities perpetrated by Russians in Ukraine is becoming the norm.

The news used to shock us.  Now it’s gradually starting to pass us by.

I was banging on about this on my radio show on 5 Live last week.

Someone texted in that I was being ridiculous, that of course we couldn’t keep talking about Ukraine 24/7 or we’d all go mad.

Fair point, I suppose. But not talking about it all the time doesn’t mean we have to forget what’s happening.

We’re not perfect in this country. Far from it.

But we sure have a much better grasp of the difference between right and wrong than those responsible for these outrages and their countrymen and women who choose to turn a blind eye.

Crisis, what crisis?

I DON’T know why the MP David Warburton did whatever he was supposed to have done.

Some commentators, obviously keen amateur psychologists, have offered a specific diagnosis: That he’s been having a mid-life crisis.

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This may or may not be true and may or may not be a reasonable explanation for whatever he’s done wrong.

But it does put me in mind of something a therapist said to me once when I was in the midst of, well, a mid-life crisis.

“I think a mid-life crisis is a perfectly rational thing to have,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows. This was a line I’d not heard before. “I mean, you’re halfway through your life, so why wouldn’t you look around yourself and ask, ‘Is this it?’”

In other words: If you’re aged between 40 and 60, let’s say, and you’re not having some kind of crisis, what’s the matter with you?

Get one going. They’re all the rage.

THE furore over having a World Cup in Qatar isn’t going away.

In fact, oddly, having had a decade or so to get used to the idea doesn’t seem to have helped — the closer we get to it, the madder it seems.

Amid all the other concerns, one potential problem has been overlooked.

The final, I see, is on December 18.

Terrific! So instead of ruining our summer this year, England might well ruin our Christmas.

It’s good to mix things up a bit, I suppose.